Managing life?
I just wrote about how my life was unmanageable earlier today; and still kind of now. And that post brought me to think about manageability, like what is healthy managing my life, or any life. And that brought me to something like ‘if my Higher Power takes away the things that block me from managing my life, living my life, what would that mean to me’?
And what I wrote above brings me to two things, like what is ‘managing my life’ and what is ‘living my life’.
Managing my life
So how would I manage my life? And why would I do that? And what does management mean? Or life whatsoever?
So what is ‘management’. Well, a search for ‘managing’ gives me a Wikipedia page about management. And that is mainly focused on business management. And it starts with “Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it be a business, a not-for-profit organization, or government body. Management includes the activities of setting the strategy of an organization and coordinating the efforts of its employees (or of volunteers) to accomplish its objectives through the application of available resources, such as financial, natural, technological, and human resources.”.
And strangely enough the ‘disambiguation page about management‘ also points to a lot of things, but not really to anything related to ‘life management’, at least not at first sight. The starting sentence gives some clue though what something like ‘life management’ could be: “Management is the directing of a group of people or entities toward a goal”.
So it seems in order to manage something, like my life, or your life, we first need to have a goal. And maybe something like ‘life goal’ already indicates a problem, at least for me, as I don’t think I have a clear goal for my life. So, well, if there is no goal there is nothing to manage, isn’t it?
But I guess it is pretty easy to formulate a goal for my life as there is some sentence in my head from one of the tapes from Louise Hay that says something like “live a happy, prosperous, fulfilling life”. That would do for me I guess, at least there comes nothing in my mind right now that I would wanted to add. Happy, prosperous and fulfilling sound pretty complete as life goals.
So then managing my life would be something like ‘directing my life towards happiness, prosperity and fulfillment’.
And I am listening now to one of her tapes about health where I thought that statement was, but I found another statement, a definition about good health: “Good health is having no fatigue, having a good appetite, going to sleep and wakening easily, having a good memory, having good humor, having precision in thought and action, and being honest, grateful, humble and loving”.
So maybe I will add health to the life goal I stated earlier: “live a happy, healthy, prosperous, fulfilling life”.
Living my life
So for now my goal would be living a happy, healthy, prosperous, fulfilling life. Quite something it seems, but also kind of normal I guess. Don’t we all want to live a happy, healthy, prosperous, fulfilling life? Maybe more important how to do that, as right now I am living a pretty unhappy, unhealthy, poor and hardly fulfilling life. But maybe that is also a good starting point for the management of going from an unhappy, unhealthy, poor and hardly fulfilling life to a happy, healthy, prosperous, fulfilling life. As as far as I know management has also something to do with measurement, checking where we exactly are and where we want to go and what the difference is.
So what would ‘happy’ mean to me? Well, I guess something like having enough money to do the things I want to do, having a good enough love life, doing the things I want to do and, maybe most important right now, getting rid of that terrible feeling, especially in my legs, that I mostly have. As that feeling blocks me from doing almost anything and stands in the way of virtually everything related to ‘happy’ or even ‘doing’. But then again, maybe a good starting point, as at least I have defined that doing something about that feeling may be the highest priority to work on. And as far as I know a solution for that may indeed be working the Steps. Another terrible feeling I have is about not having enough income and being very much in debt, so bad that recently some notices came in, one of which made me feel pretty terrified.
The healthy is pretty well defined above, so I’ll stick with the “having no fatigue, having a good appetite, going to sleep and wakening easily, having a good memory, having good humor, having precision in thought and action, and being honest, grateful, humble and loving”.
And what would ‘prosperous’ mean to me? Well something like feeling rich, being rich, like having at least USD 5 million or EUR 5 million in the bank, as I believe that is an amount I could live from, so I wouldn’t need any other income to sustain myself.
And I am not fully sure what ‘fulfilling’ means to me right now. To me the above would already be fulfilling, but recently ‘fulfilling’ also means meaning something for someone else, meaning something for other people, doing something for other people. And I can’t really state how that would look like, but it is part of the reason I started writing here, started sharing a lot here, no matter how awkward sometimes, or how private.
Ah, happiness, yes, that would include marriage, preferably with Lee, the love of my life. I often play the song Beautiful in White from Shane Filan and it is just playing now. When playing that song I often think of Lee in white our wedding ceremony. And that is crazy as he abused me so much and especially recently says such nasty things to me and about me. But I am learning more and more that he must be trapped in similar things as I am, that he must also be sick in a similar way as I am sick, me being codependent and trapped in my emotions. So I learned to love him again, love him more, recently, probably also meaning I am starting to love myself, maybe for the first time in my life.
And the last paragraph also came to be from something I read today:
One Day at a Time: Sept. 19
An Al-Anon member with a particularly serious problem was told by another at a meeting: “I just wouldn’t put up with it!”
The answer came: “I am not, as you say, putting up with it. I am trying to correct my own faults, keep my mouth shut when I am tempted to yell and scream at him, and keep hands off his problems. You see, I never want to forget that I have a commitment to my husband. I want to live up to that commitment which I made, willingly and solemnly, when I married him.”
Today’s Reminder
Any marriage made in expectation of lifelong bliss and freedom from care is bound to bring us to some shocking realizations that life just isn’t like that. An adult point of view recognizes that alcoholism and its train of troubles is only one of the disasters that can happen to a marriage. We would face others with courage, why not this? The commitment to the person we married demands that we do everything we can to correct our problems. What to do, we learn in Al-Anon. How we use it is up to us.
“. . . in sickness and in health, for better or for worse . . .”.
And the last statement has always been very important to me, even though I have not always lived up to it, which I regret now. But who can, who is perfect, especially when things are tough, unimaginably tough and crazy? And no, I am not fully sure anymore if I will stick to my non-official vow, as I have my own life to live and it is not healthy for me to stay in an abusive relationship. But I will do everything I can to make it work, probably through working the Steps more seriously.
Goals and actions
Well, the ‘management’ brought me to something like goals and actions. And keeping track of where I stand. So that would mean kind of a table, maybe with scores about how happy or unhappy I am, or how healthy or unhealthy I am or feel. Let’s see what I can start now:
Area | Score (1-10, 10 is highest) September 2017 |
Goal | Activity/action | Comments |
Happiness | ||||
General feeling | 4 | 8 | Just be happy, see My Ideal Loving Higher Power | |
Powerlessness over my emotions | 2 | 6 | Work The Steps | |
Health | ||||
No fatigue | 4 | 8 | ??? | |
Good appetite | 6 | 8 | Cook at least one meal myself once a month | |
Going to sleep and wakening easily | 4 | 7 | Give to my Higher Power | |
Having a good memory | 4 | 6 | Give to my Higher Power. Maybe I can do something with drums or Bisaya. | |
Having good humor | 2 | 6 | Maybe do something with funny movies | |
Having precision in thought and action | 4 | 6 | Be more conscientious, more precise in everything I do, like now, making this table. Just be more aware. | |
Being honest | 5 | 7 | Share more with more people in an appropriate way. | |
Being grateful | 4 | 8 | Maybe make a daily list, but needs to be something small. | I have already made progress here, a lot I think. |
Being humble | 4 | 6 | ??? | I need to find the right way to be humble. Still a struggle. |
Being loving | 4 | 8 | Maybe work on defining love or loving better, write about it here, in this site. | |
Prosperity | ||||
Loans/arrears | 2 | 6 | Communicate and try to make agreements that are manageable for me. | Ask my Higher Power to help me as I am suffering so much from this. |
Daily needs, current cash/finance | 5 | 6 | Pray | Ask my Higher Power for help |
DoctorsConnect | 4 | 8 | Leave to my Higher Power | I really don’t know what to do, except some little programming and some little follow up. |
Fulfillment | ||||
Share my experience, strength and hope | 7 | 7 | Keep writing here |
Ah, yes, I know I need to be very careful with ‘actions’ as I am easily overwhelmed if things are ‘too much’. And as I feel very, very weak I need to make sure I can really do the actions I state, otherwise it won’t work. Ah, yes, I remember now, I need to make baby steps.